What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire

Which way to go next? It has taken me forever to get into the lab today, what with so many other things needing my attention. Now that I’m here, what fascinates? I thought I might follow up last week’s post with something called “So Who’s the Alien?”, which would question a basic assumption that underlies what I wrote last week. But I don’t have the heart or mind for that right now. My body is fairly filled with anxiety today, with fog and broken glass and phantom dogs and unpaid psychic bills and rotten leftovers in the emotional fridge. So what calls?

I think it’s time to post this video, which some of you have no doubt already seen. Take a few moments. Watch and listen and soak it up. The rest of this will follow from that experience.

What I want to say today is that it has taken me almost fifty-five years to be able to admit to myself what has felt forbidden to say: I did not get that. The care that baby got? The soft, gentle, loving, respectful regard? I did not get that. Not in the way I needed it. Not when I most needed it. Not from those from whom I most needed it. I did not get that. And not getting it has shaped my life more profoundly than I would ever have guessed.

This is not to say that I never got loving care, or that my parents didn’t “love” me, or that I was not supported as a child. I was well-fed and well-clothed, relatively free, and provided with the many toys and creature comforts a modern, American, middle-class lifestyle afforded these past fifty years. I was well-regarded by teachers and classmates. I was guided and advised and trained and encouraged in all the ways the culture expected I should be. It simply wasn’t enough. Or it wasn’t what I most needed. And somehow, a thick wire got soldiered into place, or perhaps a wire was broken and tossed away, and to this day, I must struggle to regard and value myself in the way that baby is being regarded and valued. This tender, nascent, unsolidified sense of self-regard interferes with my work. It creates misunderstandings and tripping points between myself and Sally. And it forms, in large part, the heavy, clumsy armor of anxiety and fear I don whenever I venture out into the world of “other people.” It can knock me to my knees any day of the week, leaving my body filled with clenched guts and tears piled up behind the lids. And as I’ve walked my healing path, it seems to have only intensified.

But it’s not really the pain and wounding I want to speak of right now. What I want to speak of is the process.

My family is all still alive, you see. Any of them, were they interested, could read this. And I imagine that, should they do so, they would likely conclude that my reason for writing the above is to blame my parents or my ex for my life, to extract some vague revenge, and/or to demand apology and restitution, all in the hopes that this would somehow “solve” my “problem,” and set me free. And none of those conclusions, I think, would be correct. I simply need to speak the reality of my life, and not pretend, even to myself, anything other than the truth of “what happened” and “what is so.”

Again, it’s the hiding, the pretense, that kills me.

I understand, you see, that the members of my family of origin were and are good and well-intentioned people doing their best in the world with what they were given. I understand that, in some real and fundamental way, my parents simply did not know what to do with me - their little alien - and that my family members, by and large, still don’t know what to do with me even now. I understand that my healing is my own work. And I understand that it is proceeding quite nicely. It’s just that this is what the “healed” version of me looks like. The wounds - amputations, mostly, rather than cuts and bruises - are simply a part of who I am now. The missing wires may always be missing. The wounds may always hurt a bit if I scuff them against a hard surface. But even if my wounds can trip me up on a daily basis, I can regain my footing on a daily basis as well. New wires can be soldiered into place. Prosthetic devices can help me function more fully. And there are people that can help me cross the street.

I don’t need my parents to go back in time and “fix the past.” They can no more do that than I can. I simply need to say what’s so for me, and not hide the truth from myself: something hurt me so deeply in my past that it still resonates throughout my mind, heart, body, and soul, like a gong still sounding fifty-five years after the mallet blow. When I see that baby in the bathwater, I get a feeling glimpse of what that was: there was some sort of care or regard or respect that I sorely needed as a child, and which I did not get. It has become my work, as an adult, and with Sally’s help, and others’, to find that regard, and to hold it as my own.

But I cannot find it until I first admit my forbidden truths to myself.

Now stop, and spend a moment getting in touch with your own feeling response to what I’ve so far written. Because I do this shit all the time, right? I reveal my hidden truths. My pains. My stumbling blocks. My feelings. And it never seems to get any easier. And part of the reason for that, I think, lies out there. With you.

Now, when I say “you,” I don’t know who I mean. You understand that, right? I don’t know who’s reading this. I don’t know to whom this applies. You’ll have to sort that out for yourselves. All I know is that I have a great many experiences that tell me that “you” are out there, and that while I have some response-ability in the matter of my own reactions and boundaries in our relationship together, so do “you.” I talk about my own part all the time. Today I’m talking about “you.” And “you” know who you are.

I said, in What a Way to Go, that “our feelings are the swiftest path back to our forgotten selves.” I said it because I believe it. I said it because it’s my experience. I said it because it had become clear to Sally and me, as we peered over the cliff of our present predicament, that the cultural train now heading toward that cliff is fueled, in great part, by the fact that we “civilized” humans have largely disconnected ourselves from the truth of our own feelings. We do not feel the death, pain, and misery our culture has wrought on the living world around us. We do not feel our own misery here on this planet, as we are born, live, and die inside of a cultural prison that does not serve us, neither our real needs nor our most precious dreams. We do not feel, we do not allow ourselves to feel, how deeply confused, wounded, and bereft we have been rendered in this culture. And because we do not feel these things, most of us, most of the time, seem unable to respond to our collective situation in a mature, adult, human way. We have forgotten who we are, what we want, why we are here, and where we are headed. And having forgotten ourselves, we are left largely powerless in the face of our unraveling world.

Sally and I are surely not the only ones to have come to this conclusion. But we may be some of the very few who have taken the work of reconnection as deeply as we have. Feeling what one is feeling seems like an obvious and important response to our current crisis. And speaking one’s feelings, as part of a larger community discussion regarding how to meet our predicament, has felt like our work for some time. But I gotta tell ya, I surely do understand why people do not and will not take this step. Venturing into “feeling out loud” can feel like stepping onto a bloody minefield. Or a courtroom…

You know how it goes. We all do, don’t we? You put a “bad” feeling out there - ”I’m afraid.” ”I’m in pain.” ”I’m filled with anxiety.” - and what do you hear in response? Well, Johnny, tell ‘em what they’ve won…

-”Cheer up, dude. It ain’t that bad.” Not only does this response convey that your feelings are not okay and that you need to stop showing them, they call into question their validity. It’s not so bad. You are mistaken about your own feelings.

-”Yeah, lots of people feel that way.” While an attempt is being made, perhaps, to let you know you’re not alone, there is often a dark undercurrent of “so why do you get to complain about it?”

-”You need to go outside and get some fresh air.” Advice of all kinds can convey, first, that your feelings are easily “solve-able,” and second, that you are simply not smart enough to have thought of the solution yourself, or that you’ve done little or nothing to solve things on your own and return to the right, proper, and culturally approved emotional state, which is Happy™. Advice operates on the assumption that there is something to be done to make your bad feelings go away, which conveys that it’s not okay for you to have these feelings in the first place.

-”Did you see Game of Thrones last night?” There are a million ways to divert and distract you when you “break the rules” and express a feeling. Jokes. Non-sequitors. Stories about somebody else’s situation. The message is that your expression of feeling is so unwelcome that they are just going to go on as if it hadn’t happened.

There are surely other items that belong on this list. I invite you to add them.

Now, many people, upon reading this, might call foul. “Surely people are just trying to help,” they might say. “They only want what’s best for you.” Perhaps those people are correct. I do observe that most people are trying to be and do good in the world, and are doing the best they can with what they have. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that all of these responses to your expression of “bad” feeling arise from the listener’s own discomfort with feeling, and are informed by deep cultural stories that no longer serve us. And I’m going to be so bold as to just say outright that, when somebody shares feelings of pain or grief or fear or anger or anxiety or helplessness or despair with you, maybe the only thing you need do in response, and perhaps the only thing that will ever really help, is to simply listen to them and reflect what they’ve said, so that they have the experience of having been heard. You don’t have to fix it. You don’t have to make it go away. You don’t have to make it better. You don’t have to know what to do. None of that is your job. Your job is simply to hear what they say, because having the truth of our lives seen and heard and known by other human beings lies at the heart of our healing and reconnection.

All that other stuff? Stop it. Just stop it. It does not help. And, in fact, it’s what makes people ever more hesitant to express out loud the truths of their lives. Stop with the deflection, the advice, the jokes, the cheering up. Stop, and learn to just listen and reflect. Let people’s feelings simply be what they are. Let your own feelings simply be what they are. Let the expression of feeling emerge into an ever safer environment. Dig up the mines and toss them away. Clear the courtroom. Create an open meadow into which feeling can venture out into the light. Join in as the community learns to tell itself the truth. And see where that leads.

I say it will lead to healing and connection. I say it will lead to reclamation and reconciliation, to growth and maturity and evolution. I say it will take us somewhere we want to go, even as the old forms, and the life of this world, unravel around us. Step onto that swiftest path. Re-member yourself. Help others remember themselves. Let us, in this time, tell the felt truth of our lives. We will never learn to reconnect with the Earth, I think, until we learn to reconnect with our own felt truth.

The truth of my life is that I did not get something that that baby got in that bathwater, and that this lack of regard or valuing has shaped my life in painful and surprising ways. I don’t need my family to fix that, or make me feel better. I simply need to say it, and to be listened to by my village as I say it. That pain has made me who I am today, and who I am is a wonderful man. I do not need that pain turned into Happy-ness™. I simply need to stop hiding it, so that I can put the energy it takes me to do so to other uses.

Ironic, perhaps, coming from a non-empath, but there it is. Please understand that this is learned behavior on my part, gathered painfully over the course of many years. I’m still learning it, perhaps now more than ever. True empaths probably don’t need to be told any of this. And know that I will have more to say to this. The opposite of a great truth is usually another great truth, as Neils Bohr said. I want to remember that. For now, this will suffice.

Time to turn out the lights.

Pax, T

PS: I’ll be traveling in the next week or two, so will be unable to hang out in my lab. I invite you to visit your own labs and see what fascinates you. Perhaps you have a guest blog inside of you, just waiting to pop out?

Star Trek: “The Empath”

Those few who know me well know that I sometimes use the term “alien” as a self-descriptor. I refer to my “home planet,” and how we do things there, and how that world is different from this one. I joke around about having special powers and the ability to wipe people’s memories, and Sally jokes that my strange and unconscious finger- and wrist-flexing movements are a sort of communication with “the mother ship.” My clumsy, hunched, and shuffling gait, my stunted, blunted senses and interests, my facial tics and my disinterest in many things physical, leave me feeling like I’ve donned a thick, Tim-shaped deep-sea diving suit in order to sink down to the bottom of the Terran gravity well and explore this ocean of humanity. I notice my fascination with issues, ideas, assumptions, and beliefs that seem to propel me ever further to the far reaches of the “normal curve” of human culture. I rarely feel as though I belong here, and my deepest and most lonely longings take me to a world that feels sane and whole, to a land “over the rainbow” where it all makes sense to me. Home is somewhere far away, it seems, amongst the stars. Home is Asteroid B-612, and I, a “little prince,” am continually searching for my way back.

I take this on as metaphor, as useful fiction, not knowing or really caring whether there is any objective™ truth to it. Readers of All of the Above probably suspect that I’m a long-time student of that whole UFO/alien thang, and that I’m openly open to the reality of many things that the mainstream dominant culture ridicules and dismisses. I have no real objection to the notions that there are levels of reality other than the material, that there is sentient life elsewhere in the physical Cosmos and permeating other levels of existence, and that we humans on Earth are not, and have not been, as isolated as most seem to think. But I have no clear memory, no undeniable experience, no objective™ evidence that I am “really” from somewhere else. Lots of people feel out of place right now. We live inside a global culture that feels almost totally unhinged from Reality™. I do not need the “alien in a human body” story to explain my experience here.

And yet it suits me, this metaphor. One story you hear over and over in the “alien abduction” literature is how the “aliens,” and more specifically “the grays,” deeply terrified of humans, are nevertheless interacting surreptitiously with humans because they want something from them, something that they’ve lost, something they want to regain. And that’s exactly how I feel. It seems I have a missing piece.

I may have never known this about myself, had I not met up with Sally, for the piece I lack is a piece she has in abundance. It’s one she craves deeply in her interactions with other human beings, and my lack of it has been a source of pain and grief for a very long time now. That piece is empathy, the ability to put myself into the emotional space of another and feel what they are feeling. Sally is a deeply feeling soul, and while I can understand her feelings, and greatly value her passionate approach to life, and while I benefit daily from her ability to empathize with my own feelings, I seem to lack the capacity to return that gift to her.

Please understand that, to my mind, empathy is quite distinct from feeling, caring, sympathy, valuing, or understanding. I am a deeply feeling man. I value people, and care for their well-being. I can feel bad for them, and understand how they work. I just don’t make that face-to-face, vibratory, resonating, emotional connection with them. Like an alien observer, I note and analyze and catalog and understand, but there is something about me that is so different, so… other… that I don’t feel them. A useful analogy might be between kingdoms or phyla of Terran life. I feel humans’ emotional states no better than I feel the emotional states of fish or ants or cacti. The chasm is so great between us that I cannot seem to cross it. I can act in deeply feeling ways. I can look like I have empathy. But after ten years of “running the experiment,” I have to face the fact that I do not.

Was I born this way, an alien, a psychopath, a mutant, or an Asperger’s “sufferer”? Or was this missing piece knocked out of me early on as I lived in the sometimes terrifying presence of an openly angry mother and a covertly angry father? Was it a soul chunk that fell out of me on that warm, summer afternoon when my mother, furious that her young child would not stop singing that slightly bawdy version of the Popeye song, hauled him into the bathroom and washed his mouth out with soap? Or is this simply the result we should expect when a sensitive human soul is raised in a culture that denies feeling, truth, and reality at every turn?

Am I wounded, damaged, traumatized… or simply alien? And is there any way to know™? Who’s to say that people with Asperger’s aren’t simply aliens™ in human bodies?

All of this smacked like a fat dragonfly onto the windshield of my life this past week, as yet another “failure to empathize” on my part triggered deep feelings of anger, pain, and grief on Sally’s part. It was a tough and painful couple of days here, with much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, but we stayed with it, slowly processing our way through the pain and to new levels of acceptance of “what’s so,” and doing the work of grieving that which is not so. Much of “the problem” has resided in my own lack of self- acceptance. Raised in this culture with a steady diet of unconscious assumptions, I was taught to believe that empathy is good™ and the lack thereof bad™. (How many times did James T. Kirk make the case to alien cultures and beings for the grand goodness and even superiority of human beings in all their wild, messy, creative emotionality? They even did a whole episode on human empathy and aliens!) So I’ve expended much time and energy hiding my bad™ and trying to be good™. Had I simply allowed myself to know out loud the truth of my own experience, I could have sooner, and with calm but loving self-acceptance, explained to Sally how life is for me, and helped her to do the inevitable grieving work she has had to do. It’s the hiding, the pretense, that has tripped us up. And this week I let go of a large piece of that pretense.

Strangely, or perhaps obviously, I have felt a great deal of relief since. I think maybe Sally has as well. It’s amazing how much energy can get tied up in the denial of what’s so. And it’s amazing the relief I feel, when I finally tell the forbidden truths of my own experience. And when we take this vast and basic difference between us, Sally and I, and simply let it be, then new questions, new possibilities, arise almost automatically. ”Hmm…. interesting,” says Spock. The empath chose an alien. The alien chose an empath. Why did they come together? What work lies between them? What do they have to teach each other? What’s possible here that might not have been possible otherwise? How do they reach communion and connection of a different sort, this human and this alien? And how will their achieving this somehow help™?

Isn’t the lack of human empathy with the non-human life of this planet – not just dragonflies and fish and ants and cacti but rocks and air and water and light – somehow at the bottom of things when we consider the havoc our global industrial culture is right now wreaking? Aren’t some of us, we who are tuned into this culture and it’s life-threatening ways, trying to re-establish a full, loving, and empathic connection with this planet? Could this meeting of human and alien have some larger significance in the Global Culture, the Great Hologram, the Morphic Field, the Mind of God, or the Absolute?

Not sure. But I gotta say, I’d much rather we be about the work of new paradigms and next cultures and communion than the work of husband and wife crabbing at each other because “he never talks” and “she just doesn’t understand.” These are big times we live in. Our situation is unprecedented, precarious, and wildly, chaotic, to my way of seeing things. Why not try to be as big as all of that and see what happens? What could there possibly be to lose?

So that’s what life looks like in our little corner of the world this week: the empath and the alien, knockin’ ‘em down and settin’ ‘em back up, sometimes smashing like atoms in a collider, other times simply orbiting each other like binary stars, always entangled and forever on our path. Watch for strange lights flitting about in the night sky over our home. Listen for sobs, shouts, and laughter as you walk by. Note the strange things we say and the crazy ideas we explore. And know that it’s all simply a meeting of worlds going on here, as ambassadors from two vastly different experiences hash it out at the conference table.

We’ve just signed a new treaty. Here’s to that.

I come in peace,

T

If a great part of my impulse to anger is rooted in childhood wounding, as I’ve been exploring these past weeks, then the other great part arises from my present impulse to protect. Both forms of anger are largely defensive, as perhaps all anger is, but while my wounded reactivity is a largely unconscious and ultimately doomed attempt to go back in time and fix my own past, in defense of that young child who got so hurt, my present protectivity is much more about drawing clear boundaries, meeting real needs, “containing the psychopath,” warding off the blows, walking away, or standing to fight in defense of those I love.

Or can be. And that has been the key, for me: learning to tease these two types of anger apart.

While my “ranting and raging” has often been about my own unhealed attempts to be understood and wanted by my family of origin, it has also been, to a very great extent, rooted in my grief, shock, and appalled disbelief over the destruction of the living world around me. Though I can be somewhat indifferent to plants, and to most people whom I do not know, my attention keys in on the land and sea and sky and animals, and my heart breaks to see them in pain. I walk daily amongst the crows and gulls and skunks and deer, and look to the sea in the summer for signs of whales and seals. I soak up the clean salt air and stare up at the sky and the stars. I lean into the wind and tramp through the snow and walk barefoot whenever I can, relishing the feel of grass and mud and ice and gravel between my toes, grounding and connection for my soles. Having been one of the “last children in the woods,” I grew to love the land and the forests and the sun and the voices of the many “others” who fly and flit and flash about me as I make my way through the world. And so “God Made a Farmer” evokes my anger not only because modern agriculture is about the control, domination, exploitation, and imprisonment of those whom I love, but because it is a large factor in their death and destruction. In some very real ways, modern agriculture is a primary fuel for the fire that is burning us toward that “mid-century extinction” I’ve been pondering. It needs to be deeply questioned. That Dodge Trucks commercial is full of lies.

These days, my protective energies focus mostly on my wife, Sally. Those few who have grown to know Sally well over the years know what I have come to know: Sally is a force of nature herself. She has her own wounded, reactive ego, to be sure, but she works daily to set that aside, so that she can fully connect with her best, most good and essential self and channel her gifts for healing in the wider world. She’s creative in the face of need or resistance and able to step fully into acceptance, or charge determinedly into challenge, as the situation warrants. She finds few things in the world that she cannot figure out and do for herself, but her greatest love is for conversation, connection, and collaboration. She cares deeply for her fellow humans, the compliment to my own caring energies, and can step into empathy and resonance with practiced ease. Whether she’s counseling others, partnering with me on my writing or filmmaking, building a greenhouse, reclaiming her body, or starting a business, she approaches every moment of her life as another step on her spiritual journey, as an opportunity to grow, mature, evolve, and transcend. She’s without a doubt the most conscious human soul I have ever had the privilege to know. It feels like much of my role now is to protect her.

In part, Sally needs to be protected from her own wounded ego. She can easily “give it all away,” to the point of harming or undermining herself. And when attacked or violated, her great power can get channeled through a quick, hot, fierce anger that can cut right to the heart of those who, like me, were raised in “nice,” conflict-avoidance family systems. Interrupting such reactions and helping her reconnect with her true adult power has become a significant part of my work here.

But she also needs protection from “the other.” Power, heart, and clarity such as she displays can be both alluring and threatening to those with whom she comes into contact. Sally’s X-ray gaze can see right into people’s hearts, and her courageous words can shine through pretense and games and beliefs and stories and bring to clear light the truth of their lives in ways that are undeniable. Many come to Sally seeking exactly this, but for others, this can feel terrifying. Forced to confront their own woundedness, many people, compelled by the core of shame of which Brene Brown speaks, lash out, project, or blame. And Sally, wounded deeply in her own childhood, can sometimes get knocked off center for a moment, disempowered, lost, confused, and disheartened. Watching over Sally as she interfaces with the outer world, and noticing what she may not, constitutes another significant part of my work here.

As Graham Hancock said in a recent post,

I drifted into thoughts about my relationship with my wife Santha, how I am so blessed to have her in my life, how she is in fact a goddess who manifests in human form and how incredibly privileged I am that she permits me to go through this incarnation with her and learn from her how to be a better human being. And I realized how so much of our life together has been very selfishly about ME, about my work, my creativity, my concerns, and it was brought home to me with the force of a revelation that the next stage of our partnership has to be about HER and that my role now is to be of service to her and help her in every way possible to express and manifest her own wonderful creative gifts and to fulfill herself.

Yes.

We speak often, Sally and I, of anger, ranting, truth-telling, expectations and cruelty, triage and investment and our response-ability in these matters. Every morning finds us drinking coffee for an hour or two, as we “sit in the nest” and speak what’s in our hearts and minds. While I could go a hundred different directions at this point, I think for now I’ll simply notice a few things and leave it at that…

-It feels to me like protecting Sally and protecting the life of this world are one and the same. Another way of saying that might be that, in the matter of learning, or relearning, as a culture, to love, cherish, protect, and commune with the planet and its living beings now being destroyed by our out-of-balance lifestyle, that work can be done as easily in our human relationships as it can be done in “the natural world.” It may be that, if we cannot learn to love, respect, cherish, protect, and serve both ourselves and other humans, we cannot step fully into the sorts of relationships with the rest of the Cosmos that we long for, and which Sustainability™ might require.

-There’s an underlying assumption here that Sally needs protection, which points to the underlying assumption that “the world” needs protection. I’m not saying these assumptions are true or false. I’m simply pointing out that they are assumptions worthy of our notice and examination. Can Sally’s essential self ever really be hurt? Is it only her overlay of ego/personality/monkey mind/whatever you want to call it that can get hurt? Does that need to be protected? And how about “the world”? These questions deserve long deliberation, in my opinion.

-Beneath these assumptions are assumptions of vulnerability and separation, the idea that we can be hurt, really, or that we are separate from each other. These point to more foundational assumptions about materialism, time, space, life, death, and everything. Again, I put them here only as assumptions, to be held up for examination and worthy of deep dialogue.

-And my interest in examining these assumptions relates back to what I said early on: I wish to tease apart that aspect of my anger that is unconscious and reactive and that aspect which is clear and conscious and present-based. My reactive anger feels clouded and childish and dirty, and tends to get me into more trouble. My clear adult impulses to protect and serve feel clean and whole and mature, and tend to pull me into my most powerful, initiated, adult human self.

In the end, wherever this crazy world is taking me, I intend to meet it as a mature, sane, and empowered adult human soul, rather than a reactive, wounded adolescent hiding out in a grown-up body. This has been my work since I first awakened to “our present predicament.” The work continues. That “work” will likely never be finished. I hope not. But that is another story altogether.

I may not make it to the lab next week. Time will tell. Tim will tell. Sally’s Vejibag launch party approaches, and her Kickstarter campaign, and there is so much to do to serve those ends. I’ll write as that work allows.

Until then, pax,

T